Upgrade single SPWeb from Sharepoint 2007 to 2010

In my previous post I showed several useful links to start with if you plan to perform upgrade from Sharepoint 2007 to 2010. There are 2 possible upgrade approaches mentioned in MS guide:

• in-place upgrade;
• database attach upgrade.

You can use them if you need to perform upgrade of whole farm or at least whole web application or site collection. But what if we need to upgrade single SPWeb or even single SPList and leave other sites on previous version? As you probably know the minimal scalability element which can be assigned to different content database in Sharepoint is site collection. I.e. during creation of site collection you can specify that this site collection should use another content database (this is possible only if you create site collection via stsadm or object model, but not via Central Administration). But you can’t do this for particular SPWeb.

As was said above, we don’t need to upgrade all farm or affect existing environment somehow. In such case you can use the following steps in order to achieve the goal:

1. Configure new Sharepoint 2007 environment close to existing environment;
2. Export necessary SPWeb from existing Sharepoint 2007 site collection;
3. Import exported site (SPWeb) to new environment created on step 1 (you can use Sharepoint SUSHI or stsadm import/export commands for export and import);
4. So on this step you have separate Sharepoint 2007 environment and necessary SPWeb imported in it. Now you can perform in-place upgrade or database attach without affecting existing environment. If you already have configured Sharepoint 2010 environment then probably database attach approach will be faster. If not - you can consider in-place upgrade.

Hope it will help someone in everyday Sharepoint development and administration.